The Blue Bird (1918)

directed by Maurice Tourneur



I am currently developing a performance with Beatrice Brown with the working title She. I will be using this blog as a kind of study board for the project, much in the same way that I use walls in my studio; tacking up images, notes, drawings, material samples (stuff) that I can work through and reflect upon as She takes shape. I can also refer to the blog when discussing ideas with my collaborators. With this in mind I am posting the above animation taken from the 1918 film 'The Blue Bird'. She will include a polyphonic, multi-limbed, history's-angel-being-blown-backwards-into-the-future chorus/furies/muse. She is veiled and blue and I can see her there in this animation ....

I found the gif animation on The Life Cinematic. 'The Blue Bird' is a kind of fairy tale. Though I am not really interested in this aspect of the film (however fairies fascinate), it is the idea within the story that objects have souls that interests me. How is the soul represented? What theatrical and film devices does Tourneur use to image transformation?

The reviewer 'Eddie Speahetti' on 'The Life Cinematic' gives the film a 9.5/10 and describes the film thus ....

""The Blue Bird" is filled with so many imaginative sequences that one will feel lost in its impressionist haze. This film belongs to those other films which really feels like a dream. Based on a fairy-tale slash allegory, two children in their dreaming fantasies seek, with a couple of friends who are actually souls of ordinary objects like Sugar, Bread, Fire, Light, etc., the Blue Bird which is supposedly the source of all happiness. Yes, it is a childhood story that sounds a lot like bedtime books post-natal days, and some of the scenes may be a bit childish at times. But I am a fan of adventure stories and as the film progresses this fairy tale plunges ever more so down the rabbit hole, and the things that Tourneur does is astounding. No matter how ill-equipped and dated the special effects were at that time Tourneur is able to make scenes that before were only applicable to the imaginations of fairy tale readers but now it is also shown on celluloid. All the scenes have this magical quality to them - and the artifice of the entire film actually enhances this - like the scene where the characters fly off into the night, Tourneur uses cut-outs on a drawn background (OK, I'm not good at describing, see the film to get what I'm saying), or the sequence of the Queen of the Night where the boy enters a portal filled with innumerable amounts spectres, a lot of extras and cool costumes were utilized definitely, and how 'bout if we go back to the scene where Tourneur introduces us to the souls of the everyday objects, a lot of superimposition techniques are applied here to get that effect of objects transforming to characters."

Self Portrait by Kitty Huffman

If ever there was a self-portrait that captured the self in its wild peace then this is it. Sublime, mysterious, erotic.

Self Portrait from Kitty Huffman on Vimeo.

SpeakSpeaker!

Throb

Spewing horses hooves, chlorophyl, and honey; his breath storms her ribcage
and frees her heart from its torment; the frozen curse cast upon it when she
swore to God to save her from the rampaging fairies she mistook
for songs.
Column of air

1952

Marilyn Moa 1952 Phillippe Halsman

from FANTOMATIC: Zoum Zoum

Jupiter Eyeballed

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this true-color view of Jupiter on February 17, 2007, using the planetary camera detector. Jupiter's trademark belts and zones of high- and low-pressure regions appear in crisp detail. Circular convection cells can be seen at high northern and southern latitudes.

The animated gif, below, is made up of a series of stills of Jupiter and gives the sense of the swirling thermodynamic atmosphere of this largest of planets. One of the four gas giants in our solar system.

I was prompted to dig out these Hubble images of Jupiter in order to compare them with a drawing of Jupiter from the 1870's that I happened upon in DoraBalla's blog archive. You can recognize Jupiter's gassy swirling bands. It must have taken a tremendous amount of time to do this observational drawing....looking through the telescope and capturing the movement of the gas bands. This drawing of 'Jupiter' and the next drawing of 'A Group of Sun Spots and Veiled Spots' are from The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Atlas 1870-80.

I try to imagine doing an observational drawing of sun spots and I see the sun burning a hole right through my eyeball, tunnelling directly into my blind spot. A blinding needle dipped in a blood pool of light.

Hair Brained

I am working on some studies for braids and knots. In order to get my eyes to focus on the task at hand I gathered some images of hair braids off the net and photoshopped them so that i could see how they shape around the head. Hair brained.

A philosophical investigation

"Said Doctor Bunny Rabbit, staring at his shadow black,
"Indeed, I had no notion that I looked so like a quack!"

I wanted to re-visit Wittgenstein's duckrabbit thought experiment after setting myself the task in the studio of pursuing 2 different approaches to drawing; namely, drawing from observation and drawing from my imagination. The idea was to consider how these 2 different approaches to drawing effected the outcome. Of course, I realize that making art is hardly an empirical process, and that setting up an 'experiment' in the studio often produces something unrelated to the experiment itself, it was nevertheless a means to look at how I see. What I found through these drawing exercises is that the process of looking and seeing (observing and imagining) are bridged by an hallucinatory space. While drawing I sense what I can only describe as a sort of zooming between microcosm and macrocosm; and a sort of flipping between inside and outside. This seems to be occurring both on the page and in my body. It feels so radically ambiguous, a perpetual de-stabilization of the figure and ground, body and page, tool and hand, eye and mind.



There is a clearly written introduction to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations on wikipedia. I found 'A Shadow Show' on BibliOdyssey's blog.

GLASS MOUNTAIN

a few drawings from the studio this week